Peter Fagundo: Love’s Confusing Joy
@ The Bike Room
1109 W. North Shore Ave, Chicago, IL 60626
Opening Saturday, June 1st, from 4 PM - 7 PM
On view through Saturday, July 6th
The bike room is proud to present
Love’s Confusing Joy, new works by Peter Fagundo. The genesis of Fagundo’s foray into these forbidden regions is the 2011 Gagosian exhibition Picasso and Marie-Thérèse: L’amour Fou. Cracked open by the fruits of this legendary couple, Fagundo’s muse is erotic love.
Plummeting into the unctuous properties of oil paint with a hardcore sexuality that parallels his subject matter, Fagundo anoints entangled flesh – limbs, digits, tooth and tongue – with expressionistic accuracy.
The framing edge in Fagundo’s paintings does not crop – it contains, thus avoiding the role of window that could render the viewer voyeur. On the floor, two duct tape sculptures tightly bind stuffed masses into disfigured cubes. Likewise, Fagundo’s canvas stretchers become the four walls that compress groping lovers into cramped quarters. No perpendicular ground plane breaks the verticality of the canvas, or separates us from them.
Fagundo describes his paintings as “leaps into the awkward relationship between painting and pornographyâ€. There is charged tension between us as viewers, and the players described in earth-and-flesh tones of caked-on paint. The proximity of vantage point is so close to the act of passion that no single image is viewed in its entirety. We catch glimpses of a striped blanket, a lock of hair, a thrusting finger – the viewer is not left outside.
Peter Fagundo’s work is represented in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Joan Flash Artist Book Collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. He exhibits internationally and locally, and is represented by Dan Devening Projects, Chicago. Fagundo is an instructor in the Department of Painting and Drawing and Contemporary Practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he holds an MFA in Painting and Drawing.
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Tags: Peter Fagundo, Rogers Park, The Bike Room
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